What God Has Joined Together

Some Pharisees came to Jesus and asked whether it was lawful for a man to divorce his wife. Mark says they were testing him. Divorce was a live debate among the rabbis of the day, with some schools permitting it for almost any cause and others restricting it, and whatever Jesus said would please someone and offend someone. He answered with a question: what did Moses command? They cited the permission in Deuteronomy for a certificate of divorce.

Jesus' reply reframes the whole subject. Moses wrote that law, he says, because of the hardness of your hearts. But at the beginning of creation God made them male and female, and for this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh. Then the sentence married couples have heard at their own weddings. What God has joined together, let no one separate.

The Pharisees asked about the exit. Jesus talked about the design. That is worth noticing for any couple, because it is easy to spend a marriage thinking about the terms of the arrangement, what each owes and what each may withhold, when the deeper question is what the thing was made for.

Three things follow from Jesus' answer for a marriage on an ordinary week in July.

First, leaving and cleaving are still the shape of it. A man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife. Many marriages struggle not because the couple has stopped loving each other but because one or both never fully left. Parents still have the deciding vote. Old loyalties, old habits, old ways of spending time and money were never renegotiated. Jesus' words invite a couple to ask, gently, whether the leaving has happened, and if not, to finish it together.

Second, one flesh is God's work, not merely the couple's. What God has joined together. The union is not just a contract two people signed; it is something God did when they made their vows. That is a comfort on the days when the feeling of unity is nowhere to be found. You are not one flesh because you feel like it this week. You are one flesh because God joined you, and he does not undo his work when the feeling fades.

Third, hardness of heart is the enemy. Jesus names it as the reason the law of divorce existed at all. Hardness does not usually arrive all at once. It accumulates in small refusals, the apology not offered, the conversation postponed, the resentment quietly fed. Yesterday's reading, Mark 11:25, told us to forgive anyone we hold something against before we go on praying. In marriage, that instruction needs repeating daily. Soft hearts are the ordinary means by which God keeps together what he joined.

None of this is meant to shame those whose marriages have ended. Jesus himself acknowledges that hard hearts are real and that God made provision for them. Scripture elsewhere speaks with compassion to the abandoned and the betrayed. But for couples still together, and perhaps tired, the passage offers not a rule but a return. Go back to the beginning. Remember who joined you. And ask him, as the disciples did indoors afterward, to explain what you did not understand.